How OHROS Consulting Group enables digital transformation in asset management

The team at OHROS Consulting Group partner with clients from asset intensive industries on their most pressing strategic and digital challenges. What are some of the main challenges they work on? Members from the award-winning consultancy firm shed light on the matter.

The energy transition is in full swing and power generation, transmission, and distribution are evolving at a fast pace. Asset management plays a central role in the transition to greener energy – at OHROS Consulting Group, we partner with boards and management team of transmission system operators (TSOs) and asset intensive companies to optimize asset management, benchmark performance, and support long-term investment planning.

Digital transformation

New technologies are transforming how energy assets are managed, inspected, maintained, and renewed. They carry the potential to increase resilience, safety, and affordability and entire power networks. Technologies such as internet of things,, robotics, and generative artificial intelligence are already transforming asset management and have the potential to bring ever deeper change, and with it, value.

Concrete benefits of digitalisation range from providing unprecedented insight in assets’ condition (thus reducing the cost of maintenance and optimising renewals), to increasing the safety of inspections, efficiency of processes, and strengthening resilience to extreme weather events.

Our experts help organizations not only understand the potential and impact of technologies, but also through the next steps, guiding them through prioritizing, planning, and the successful delivery.

This process of digital transformation is far from simple. In our experience, it always starts with people. Digital is first and foremost a human transformation: touching customers, requiring shifts in behaviours and competencies within the company, and radiating throughout the supply chain eco-system.

At the investment level, digitalisation is shortening the renewal cycles – going from 30-40 years of past times to the current 10-15 years, in select asset classes – and introducing complexity, with different hardware and software cycles within the same asset.

At the operational level, digital transformation necessitates the development of digital analytical capabilities and systems that enable operators to make better, informed decisions for each asset. This requires data integration across various asset management systems.

The reality on the ground however is that of fragmentation and complexity: existing systems have often grown organically, can be outdated, and struggle to integrate with other systems. The modernisation of systems and data warehouses is both complex and expensive, and on top of that, a specific caveat in the asset-intensive sector is that digital investments must be brought in line with other capital expenditures and co-existing maintenance, renewal, and expansion priorities.

To make matters even more challenging, the pool of specialised contractors operating in Europe, is finite and already in high demand. Therefore, resourcing bottlenecks can affect the sequence and timing of any changes concerning assets, including the switch to more digital ways of working.

Meanwhile, from a regulatory perspective, operators experience conflicting pressure, with authorities simultaneously calling for greater data transparency and sharing and enhanced data security.

In the specific case of power transmission, while regulators expect adoption of digital technologies, the financial burden typically stays with TSOs, and incentives for digitalisation are seldom offered. While this stance encourages investments being prioritised by the ultimate value they deliver, it creates a challenging investment environment for operators.

Allies for the journey

Leveraging our deep expertise in asset-intensive industries combined with digital knowhow, OHROS Consulting Group assists clients at every stage of the digital transformation journey: from readiness assessments, to assisting with digitalisation strategies, to rolling up our sleeves and working with in-house teams at full digitalisation program implementations.